Summary

Robert Slutzky was an artist, theorist, and teacher, a graduate of The Cooper Union and Yale, and a former Professor in Architecture and Art at The Cooper Union and the University of Pennsylvania.

His painting, in the tradition of Mondrian, van Doesburg, and his teacher Josef Albers, explored the dimensions of color and abstract form in relation to the picture plane and its three-dimensional implications. It was these implications that made his work and theoretical investigations of serious interest and importance to architects. Through and by means of painting, he insistently registered the sometimes ambiguous, but always present, spatial relations between the painted plane and the architectonic volume, and his teaching at The Cooper Union between 1968 and 1990 formed a generation of students sensitive to color, light, and space. His dedication to teaching was legendary and his trenchant but reasoned criticism was a stimulus to intensive study.

Robert Slutzky’s works are in numerous private and public collections in the United States and Europe and have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.